The thieves looked even more pitiful than their haul of crushed snack cakes and potato chips.
Three boys under the age of fourteen in varying painful stages of puberty sat on cold metal chairs outside the store manager’s office, looking like they were ready to puke. Beyond them, Nolan Graham hovered in the cookie aisle.
After that morning’s three-vehicle fender bender on the highway, the hardware store’s “stolen” string trimmer display that turned up in the storeroom, and Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler nearly getting scammed over the phone by someone claiming to be their grandson, I’d had a busy damn day already.
It was a good thing I’d had my first full night’s sleep in weeks.
Thanks to Lina.
I usually woke with a start to the sound that haunted my brain. And while I did remember it in my dreams, this morning I’d woken to Lina in my arms. She’d sought me out in her sleep. That fact—and my reaction to it—made me think that just maybe I was still alive, still worth trusting.
I owed her, the woman who was taking up every available brain cell that wasn’t occupied with work and breathing. Thanks to the talk and the sleep, I was feeling more hopeful than I had in a long time. She’d opened up just a crack, and what I’d seen beyond her sexy exterior had me wanting a longer, deeper look.
“Hate to call you in here for a couple of Little Debbie’s, Chief, but I gotta set an example,” Big Nicky said. Manager of Grover’s Groceries for nearly as long as I’d been alive, the man took his job seriously.
“I understand your predicament, Big Nicky. All I’m sayin’ is I think there’s a way around this that doesn’t involve pressing charges. We all do stupid things. Especially at that age.”
He huffed out a breath and glanced over my shoulder at the kids. “Hell, when I was that age, I was stealin’ my daddy’s cigarettes and cutting class to go fishing.”
“And you made it out of childhood without a record,” I pointed out.
He nodded thoughtfully. “My mama scared me straight. Guess not all of us are lucky enough to have parents who care enough to scare the shit out of us.”
I knew what that was like. Could still feel the tilting of my axis after Mom—the glue, the fun, the love of our family—left this world, and us, behind.
“Toby and Kyle, their parents are gonna ground them until it comes time for learner’s permits,” I predicted.
“But Lonnie…” Big Nicky let that hang there.
But Lonnie.
Knockemout wasn’t good at keeping secrets. That was how I knew Lonnie Potter was a tall, tough kid who had a mom that skipped out on him and his siblings two years ago. His dad worked third shift, which left little time for raising kids. I also knew that Lonnie had quietly joined the Drama Club at school. First, probably to have a place to go when no one was home, and then because he’d taken a liking to trying on other people’s lives. He was good at it, according to Waylay. But no family members ever showed in the audience on opening night.
“Noticed the paint’s peeling outside,” I mused.
“That’s what I get for hiring that yahoo’s crew outta Lawlerville. Did a shit job with shit paint because they don’t give a shit. Pardon my French. None of them live here to be embarrassed by watching their half-assed work flake away.”
“Bet some motivated young labor could get the job done for you for the cost of materials.” I nodded toward the hallway.
Big Nicky’s smile was slow. “Huh. You might be right, Chief. Nothing like a little manual labor to keep you out of trouble.”
I hooked my thumbs in my belt. “That option sits well with you, I’ll talk it over with their parents. I have a feelin’ they’ll be amenable.”
“I’m feelin’ pretty amenable myself,” he said.
“Then I’ll get ’em out of your hair and we’ll work it out with the parents.”
“Appreciate that, Chief.”
I found Grave standing guard over the boys, frowning like a terrifying specter.
“All right, gang. I’ve got a one-time offer for you that’s gonna save you from a lifetime of grounding and me an acre of paperwork…”
Grave and I trooped the boys out the back and into my SUV to keep the gossip mill from getting any hotter. Piper greeted the troublemakers with nervous peeks between the seats.
We ran through the situation with Toby’s and then Kyle’s parents. Punishments were doled out, community service and official apologies agreed upon.
“My dad ain’t home,” said Lonnie, the remaining member of the felonious trio in the back seat. “He’s workin’ a double.”
Piper wagged her tail from her perch on Grave’s lap.
“I’ll get a hold of your dad at work,” I told him.
Lonnie stared out the back window, looking mournful. “He’s gonna kill me.”
That crust of tough wasn’t as thick as he thought it was.
“He’s gonna be mad. But mad means he cares,” I told him.
“I fucked up.” The kid winced. “Sorry. I mean screwed up.”
Grave and I exchanged a look.
“You ever set fire to your daddy’s shed with fireworks you stole from your drunk neighbor?” Grave asked him.
“No! Why? Someone say I did?”
“You ever get busted for fighting four guys on the playground just because they said your brother was an asshole when they weren’t wrong and your brother was an asshole?” I asked.
“No. I only have sisters.”
“Point is, kid, we all fuck up,” Grave said.
I met Lonnie’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “What matters is how we handle things post-fuckup.”
“Wait. You guys did all that?”
Grave smirked. “And more.”
“But we learned that raisin’ hell gets old and the consequences of bad decisions last a hell of a long time.” Lucian came to mind. I’d wondered over the years what path he would have followed if he’d had it easier in the beginning. One thing was for sure, he never would have ended up behind bars at seventeen if someone had given him a chance. “That goes for life and women and everything in between.”
“You should be writin’ this down, kid. This shit’s gold,” Grave told our passenger.
After dropping Lonnie off at home and calling his father at work, I sprang for sodas at the Pop ’N Stop. I parked in the school zone to scare the shit out of speeders…and to annoy Nolan, who stuck to my ass like glue in his black Tahoe.
Grave took off his KPD cap and rubbed a hand over his bare scalp. “Got a minute?”
That was never a good sign.
“Problem?” There was a reason he hadn’t wanted to have this talk at the station, I guessed.
“Dilton.”
And there was the reason. Tate Dilton had been a rookie patrol cop when I’d taken the helm from longtime chief Wylie Ogden whose decades of good-ol’-boy “leadership” had left a stain on the department.
Dilton was what I labeled a “jock” in the profession. He wanted the adrenaline, the pursuits, the confrontations. He enjoyed showing off his authority. His takedowns were more aggressive than necessary. His citations were lopsided with him coming down harder on people who rubbed him the wrong way personally. He also spent more time in the gym and at the bar than he did at home with his wife and kids.
I just plain didn’t like him.
Clearing out the entire department when I took over hadn’t been an option, so I’d kept him on, invested time trying to mold him into the kind of cop we needed behind the badge. I partnered him with a solid, experienced cop, but training, oversight, and discipline only went so far.
“What about him?” I asked, reaching for my drink so my hands had something to do.
“Had a few issues with him when you were laid up.”
“Such as?”
“He was a dog off the leash while you were on leave. Roughed up Jeremy Trent for public intoxication in the parking lot after the high school football game couple of weeks ago. Unprovoked. In front of the guy’s kid—defensive tackle—who got in Dilton’s face along with half the team. Rightfully so. Things woulda gotten real messy if Harvey and a couple of his biker buddies hadn’t stepped in.”
Fuck.
“Jeremy okay? He press charges?”
“Laughed it off. Paid his fine. Pair of bruised knees and some road rash as souvenir. Didn’t remember a damn thing after sleepin’ it off. But there would have been a hell of a lot more to remember if it had gone any further.”
Jeremy Trent had been captain of the baseball team and beat out Dilton for homecoming king their senior year of high school. They’d had more than a handful of run-ins over the years ever since. Jeremy was an affable guy who worked for the sewer authority and drank too much on the weekends. He thought he and Dilton were friends. But Dilton still seemed to think they were in some kind of competition.
Grave’s mouth was tight as he stared through the windshield.
“What else?”
“Tried to take a traffic stop too far. Real nice Mercedes SUV goin’ just a hair over the speed limit on the highway. Just got passed by a souped-up pickup going about twenty over the limit. Dilton ignores the truck driven by his drinkin’ buddy Titus and pulls over the Mercedes instead. Black driver.”
“Goddammit.”
“Dispatch flagged me as soon as Dilton called it in. Had a bad feeling about it so I headed out with Bannerjee. Good thing too. He had the driver out of the car and cuffed, was yellin’ at the wife who was recording him on her phone.”
“Why’s this the first I’m hearing about it?”
“Like I said, you were laid up. And you’re hearin’ about it now cause last night he was overheard running his mouth at that shithole bar Hellhound talkin’ bout how he’s gunnin’ for chief since you can’t do the job.”
Grave pulled no punches.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said, putting the car in gear and scaring the hell out of seventeen-year-old Tausha Wood when I pulled out behind her pickup truck.
“Now?” Grave asked.
“Now,” I said grimly.
A day ago, I wouldn’t have had the energy for this shit, but I’d woken up with a mostly naked Lina pressed up against a mostly naked me. It was more powerful than any prescription I’d tried.
I ran a small, solid department that served a small, solid community. A few thousand people who had more history between them than most families. Sure, we were a rough-and-tumble community maybe a little more likely to solve an argument with fists and alcohol. But we were tight-knit. Loyal.
That didn’t mean that we didn’t see trouble. Being this close to Baltimore and DC meant it occasionally spilled into town limits. But having trouble come from a badge in my department? That wouldn’t stand.
We were good men and women dedicated to serving and protecting. And we were getting better with every response, every training.
There were a thousand ways beyond our control a call could go south. A thousand ways we could make a dangerous mistake. There was no room or reason to add attitude and prejudice to the list.
So we trained and drilled and debriefed and analyzed.
But a department was only as good as its weakest officer. And Dilton was ours.
“Here he comes,” Grave said, giving the heads-up.
Tate Dilton didn’t bother knocking. He strolled into my office like he owned the place. He was a reasonably good-looking guy despite the receding hairline and beer belly. His mustache pissed me off, probably because it reminded me of Marshal Graham, who had helped himself to an empty workstation and was doing a goddamn sudoku.
“What can I do ya for, Chief?” Dilton said as he took a seat, ignoring the rest of the room’s occupants.
I closed the case folder I’d been reading, added it to the stack on my desk.
“Shut the door.”
Dilton blinked before getting to his feet and closing the door.
“Have a seat,” I said, indicating the chair he’d just vacated.
He dropped down again, kicking back and lacing his fingers over his belly like he was on his buddy’s couch watching the game.
“Officer Dilton, this is Laurie Farver,” I said, introducing the woman he’d yet to acknowledge standing by the window.
“Ma’am,” he said, giving her a dismissive nod.
“You know, Tate, growing up, my neighbor had this dog that he kept on a leash. From a distance, that dog looked nice. Soft, yellow fur. Big, fluffy tail. As long as he was on that leash, he was fine. But the second that leash slipped, it was game over. You couldn’t trust him. He started gettin’ loose. Chasin’ kids. Bitin’ people. My neighbor didn’t shore up that hole in his fence. Didn’t tighten up the leash. Eventually, one day, that dog attacked two kids out ridin’ their bikes. Dog had to be put down. And his owner got sued.”
Dilton sneered around the gum he was chewing. “No offense, Chief, but I don’t really give a flying fuck about no neighbor and no neighbor’s dog.”
Beneath my desk, Piper let out a low growl from her dog bed.
“Here’s the thing, Officer Dilton. You’re that dog. I’m not always gonna be here to keep that leash on tight. Bottom line is, if I can’t trust you in the field on your own, I can’t trust you period. Your recent actions have made it clear that you aren’t prepared to serve, much less protect. And if I can’t depend on you to do your job to the best of your ability, then we’ve got a serious problem.”
Dilton’s eyes narrowed and I saw a glint of mean in them. “Maybe you don’t get it since you’re basically riding a desk these days, but I got shit to do out there. Someone’s gotta maintain order.”
I sat with that for a second. I had been slipping. And that had consequences. Dilton had taken advantage of the loose leash, which meant not only were his actions on me, it was also up to me to make it right.
“I’m glad you brought that up. Let’s talk about that shit you’ve been doin’. Like tripping Jeremy Trent outside a football game, kneeing him in the back, and cuffing him in front of his kid and half the stadium when all he did was remind you that you owed him twenty bucks on the Ravens game. Or shit like letting your buddy Titus drive twenty miles an hour over the speed limit while you pull over a Black aerospace engineer and his civil rights attorney wife in a Mercedes for going five over. You then proceeded to remove the driver from his car under the probable cause of…let me check your report to make sure I get this right…” I glanced down at the paperwork in front of me and read. “The wanted poster of a prison escapee that’s been hangin’ on our bulletin board for three years.”
Dilton’s face twisted into an ugly mask. “I had the situation handled until your lap dogs showed up.”
“You had the driver handcuffed, bruised, and lying facedown on the road in a tuxedo while his wife recorded your actions on her cell phone when Sergeant Hopper and Officer Bannerjee arrived on scene. According to their report, they could smell alcohol on your breath.”
“That’s bullshit. Hop and that bitch are out to get me. I observed the suspect driving erratically above the posted speed limit and I—”
It felt as though someone had switched a light on inside me. Gone was the icy numbness, the dark void. In its place, a simmering anger bubbled to life, warming me from within.
“You fucked up. You put ego and prejudice ahead of your job, and in doing so you put your job at risk. You put this department at risk. Worse, you put lives at risk.”
“This is bullshit,” Dilton muttered. “Is that bitch wife waving her law degree around, makin’ threats?”
“Officer Dilton, you are hereby suspended with pay, but only because that’s procedure. Pending a full investigation of your conduct as an officer. I wouldn’t get used to that paycheck.”
“You can’t fuckin’ do that.”
“We’re opening an official investigation. We’ll be talking to witnesses, victims, suspects. And if I find anything that looks like a pattern of abuse, I’ll have your badge permanently.”
“This wouldn’t be happening if Wylie was still here. You stole this office from a good man and—”
“I earned this office and I’ve worked damn hard to make sure men like you don’t fucking abuse it.”
“You can’t do this. Ain’t no union rep here. You can’t throw some bullshit suspension at me without my rep.”
“Ms. Farver is your union rep. Though I’m guessing she’s not as enthusiastic about repping you after hearing your bullshit. Mr. Peters? Mayor Swanson, are you still with us?” I asked.
“Still here, Chief Morgan.”
“Yep. Heard it all,” came the replies from my speakerphone.
“Officer Dilton, Mr. Peters is Knockemout’s solicitor. That means lawyer who represents the town in case you need the definition. Mr. Peters, does Knockemout need me to cover anything else with suspended Officer Tate Dilton?” I asked.
“No, Chief. I believe you covered everything. We’ll be in touch, Officer Dilton,” the lawyer said ominously.
“Thank you, Eddie. How about you, Mayor Swanson? You want to say your piece?”
“I’ve got a lot of pieces I’d like to say of the four-letter variety,” she said. “Y’all are lucky I’ve got my grandkids in the car with me. Suffice it to say I am looking forward to a thorough investigation and if, like Chief Morgan says, we find a pattern of a-b-u-s-e, I will not hesitate to kick your a-s-s.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Message received.” I looked at Dilton, who was turning a shade of lobster. “I’ll take that badge and service weapon now.”
He came out of his chair like he was on a spring. His hands curled into tight fists at his sides, fury flashing in his eyes.
“You wanna take a swing at me, do it. But understand that that’s got its own consequences and you’re about up to your ears in them already,” I warned. “Think on it.”
“This won’t stand,” he snarled, throwing his badge and gun on my desk, knocking over my nameplate in the process. “This is supposed to be a brotherhood. You’re supposed to have my back, not take the word of a couple of asshole outsiders or some pathetic drunk who peaked in high school.”
“You can run your mouth about brotherhood all you want, but the bottom line is you’re in this work for yourself. For the power trips you think you can get out of it. That’s not a brotherhood. That’s one pathetic kid trying to make himself feel like a big man. And you’re right, I’m not gonna stand for it. Neither are any of them.”
I pointed to the window where the rest of Knockemout’s officers stood—even the ones who had the day off. Arms crossed, legs braced. Behind Dilton, Grave grunted in satisfaction.
“Now get out of my station.”
Dilton yanked the door open so hard it bounced off the wall. He stormed out into the bullpen and laid a glare on the rest of the department.
Zeroing in on Tashi, he got in her face, looming over her. “You got a problem, little girl?”
I was halfway out of my seat and Grave was already in the doorway when Tashi smiled up at him. “Not anymore, asshole.”
Bertle and Winslow stepped up behind her, smirking.
Dilton raised a finger, shoved it in her face. “Fuck you.” He glared down the other officers and pointed at them. “Fuck you too.”
With that, he stormed out of the station.
“‘Not anymore, asshole?’ Bannerjee, that’s some G.I. Jane–level shit there,” Winslow said, slapping her on the shoulder.
She beamed like the teacher had just handed over a gold star. Even I couldn’t help but smile.
“Guess I’ll be on my way,” the union rep said with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
“Good luck,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Thanks.”
“Good to have you back, Chief,” Grave said to me before following her out of my office.
Piper scrabbled at my legs. I leaned down and put her in my lap. “Well, that went well,” I said to the dog.
She gave me an enthusiastic slurp with her tongue before hopping down onto the floor again.
I picked up my nameplate and ran my fingers over the letters. Chief of Police Nash Morgan.
I wasn’t back. Not all the way yet. But it felt like I’d finally taken a step in the right direction.
Maybe it was time to take another.
